On Sat, 2005-11-26 at 09:32 +0100, Michiel de Bruijne wrote:
> > There's no way that we can make, for example, Return to Castle
> > Wolfenstein or Enemy Territory, both of which are extremely popular, use
> > ALSA natively.  They *do* work with ALSA compiled with USE="oss" or with
> > alsa-oss installed.  As far as I know, the oss USE flag on ALSA only
> > enables the alsa-oss dependency.
> 
> All the systems I maintain have -oss and don't have alsa-oss installed (I do 
> have activated OSS emulation in the kernel though). All the games I have 
> installed on those systems (including RTCW and ET) work perfectly. That 
> doesn't off course say that all Gentoo-based systems or all games work 
> without problems, but I'm trying to say that the dependency on alsa might not 
> be as necessary as you seem to think.

Having OSS emulation in the kernel is the same as merging alsa-oss if
using alsa-driver.

> > > > For the programs that are oss-only a useflag shouldn't even exists,
> > > > because it's not optional.
> >
> > For those applications, correct.  However, I have shown a good reason
> > for it.  Unless we simply tell anyone to always merge alsa-oss if they
> > want to play games, which isn't exactly a "works out of the box"
> > solution.  I can think of a few scenarios we could employ to work around
> > this, but they aren't nearly as clean as simply having OSS in the
> > default USE.  Personally, I think it should stay until it is removed
> > from the kernel, and even then, it must stay so long as we are
> > supporting 2.4 kernels which do not have ALSA, such as vanilla-sources.
> 
> Shouldn't 2.4 users use a 2.4 profile? (if they don't they have other 
> "challenges" as well e.g. udev vs. devfs). oss turned on by default in a 2.4 
> profile makes perfect sense to me.

They do.  The point being that I would prefer not diverge them
significantly except in locations where necessary.

The real problem comes in with a game, such as enemy-territory, that
uses oss.  If we remove oss from the default USE, we must have the game
check for either alsa-oss being installed, or check the kernel
configuration itself (yuck!).  With it being a default, we can just
explain to the user that they need OSS support, as the default suggests.

I really would not have a problem with removing oss from the default USE
if someone can come up with a clean way of making sure the support is
there on these older binary games.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux